I cut a project together on FCP X, text, transitions, clips, sound- everything perfect and ready for colour.

I then took all project files and the exported XML on a hard drive, went to a MacPro, copied all files across and proceeded to import the XML into DaVinci with a view to do a round trip after grading back into FCP.

When in DaVinci my text animations didn't operate as had done in FCP, some clips were replaced with a black screen and my audio was not there. Da vinci looked for all clips and found all but 2 (the 2 files were in the same folder, it should have found them). However 98% of my clips were there so I proceeded to spend the evening grading the clips...

I then exported the XML after rendering (picking the round trip option)

now I'm back on FCP, imported the XML ...

... some audio missing, text animation no longer there (but the key frames are??), transitions not there however the colour has been graded.

Any advice you guys can give me to fix this would be very much appreciated. Really don't want to have to re edit my project. Did I get soemthing wrong with the XML import in Davinci?

You can't expect an NLEs text, custom transitions or plugins to translate in a different application. This is true of round tripping via xml with any brand of NLE. I would consider it a miracle that keyframes survived.

Audio round tripping with da Vinci has always been poor as frankly the audio should be going to a sound post crew and all you need in da Vinci is a guide mix which I grab from the reference quicktime that you should always make to check the xml import.

So again don't expect audio to round trip especially if it has filters, dynamic mixing etc. Normal workflow would see a video only export to da Vinci, audio to a DAW and marry back the mix in FCP, Pr or AVID with the round trip graded video files. Then you will have to always do some house keeping to put custom filters or transitions back on clips.

Yes I totally get where you're coming from, I didn't expect Da Vinci to offer me anything but the clips to colour which is why I proceeded with the grade despite my timeline looking slightly astray.

My thoughts were just that it would lift the clips, allow me to colour them then send it all back in the same sequence as it came in with the XML to then plonk it back into the project on final cut which holds all the intricate transition and animation content.

Apparently this is not the case! I have however found a bunch of loose colour graded clips in the same folder I set the XML to export into (I presume it had to do this as the xml is just a text file). I will try and use my original project in FCP and drag the graded clips to replace the old ones, hopefully with minimal retiming alterations.

In terms of this workflow, I get what you're saying, makes sense given how haphazard da vinci has responded. I presumed that colour was last and then sound, perhaps I should have come to the final edit, sent to da vinci with a guide audio track and then come back into FCP to add text/animations and then into sound editing.